


a half, a third; fire makes fragments of us all

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-16 13:07:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13054617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: There is no place safer than being presumed dead.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [graveExcitement (arachnids)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arachnids/gifts).



Quigley Quagmire spends his first few hours in presumed orphanhood crying guttural, sea lion cries. This comes, of course, after the first hour passes, wherein he’d been too afraid to move away from the trap door, but he’d remained hopeful. His mother was coming back with Duncan and Isadora, she’d said, and there was no reason to assume otherwise. His mother, who was competent and unhurried in the face of almost anything, had never told him something untrue before. 

So Quigley’s crying hours did not begin until after that first one. 

It was not a spacious tunnel, but Quigley was not a very long boy. After trying in vain to open the trapdoor above him — was it blocked by something above it, or was it simply too heavy for him, he had no way of knowing — he began his climb down, filthy, sobbing, and with fingernails askew. 

He felt that his imminent doom was right at his heels the entire walk, an aimless scrabble, because he didn’t know where he was headed, only that he was filled with a wild desire to be anywhere but. 

When Quigley emerged, his trousers were ripped and sullied, his eyes blurry and gritted, he was only a little relieved not to have died underground. If his mother had survived the fire, Quigley knew, she would have sent someone for him. 

Knowing that is terrible; the not knowing is worse. A question kept circling him, like a vulture with keen instincts:  _ was he still a triplet if he was the only surviving third?  _

News from the outside world did not take long. He had landed in a gorgeous manor, although he was a little too out-of-sorts to properly appreciate it at the time, aside from the fact that there was a shower with running water that he used to get clean. It seemed empty, but not long-vacant: there were two papers piled up on stoop, and a third arrived while he was there that first morning. 

The Punctillio’s gauche headline rang out  _ Only Twins Survive Mansion Fire,  _ and Quigley wished, for a bright moment, that he had perished in the fire, but then remembered to be grateful that he hadn’t. 

The timeline of Quigley Quagmire’s miserable adventures since the moment where his parent’s mansion had burned down had been an endless litany of longing and the wide sweep of the imminent desire to sit down and let the street sweepers brush him into the bin at the end of the day. He postponed the second urge on a day to day basis, telling himself he could think about it again the next day. 

There was no pushing the longing back. Quigley missed his mother, and her cool hands on his fevered head while he crouched in the dark, narrow space below the mansion; he missed his father and his surety when he wanted someone to tell him what to do and not to have to question it; he missed Duncan, his clockwork analytical sense, and he missed Isadora, who would have an Oscar Wilde quote for him. 

Some of those things, he might experience again. 

By the time Jacques Snicket showed up, Quigley Quagmire might have trusted just about anyone, but it didn’t hurt that he was built like a finely lined map and said, “Well, don’t you just have your mother’s ears.”

“Did you know my mother? Do you know who I am?” 

Jacques looked at Quigley and Quigley wondered if he could tell that Quigley had borrowed clothing from someone who used to live in this house (Who probably still did but was perhaps on vacation? He had no way of knowing.) without permission. It had been a lonely few days and Quigley did not want to get into trouble so soon after becoming an orphan. He wasn’t sure if he could bear it. 

“I assume, from the big eyes and the fact that you’re here, that you’re a Quagmire,” Jacques said, and stuck out his hand. “I’m Jacques Snicket.” 

Quigley shook his hand like he shook his father’s hand, firmly but feeling ridiculous. “I’m Quigley.” 

“I am sorry about your parents, Quigley,” Jacques said, but Quigley had done all of his crying already, for days. There was nothing moist left inside of him. Even opening his mouth resulted in a clicking noise. 

“The paper said my siblings survived,” Quigley said. “And they don’t think I did.” 

“I saw that,” Jacques said. “Already calling the pair of them twins. Imbeciles, every one of them. Never you mind, Quigley, the paper is a load of garbage.” 

Quigley touched his mouth. He’d underestimated — there was still something damp behind his eyes, he could feel it being summoned now. 

“Which is not to say,” Jacques said suddenly, “That it’s  _ wrong.  _ About this. I do think your siblings are alive and well.”

“Do you know where they are? Can you take me to them?” Quigley found himself stuttering over the importance of his desires. He’d been longing for his family for days, the kind of persistent thought that had been even less avoidable than his hunger. He could almost hear Isadora in his mind already, teasing and laughing at him. He wouldn’t even  _ mind  _ a little. 

“I am sorry,” Jacques said. “I do not think I can bring you together, not just yet.”

Jacques was a very large man, and Quigley’s parents were always advising him about what a gentleman would or would not do, and the  _ would not  _ column definitely included engaging in fisticuffs with adults. For a second, though, Quigley thinks very clearly about hitting Jacques. 

A gentleman uses his words, his mother says, months ago, and that will have to do. “Why not?” Quigley asks. 

“Because you’ve been declared dead. And there is no place safer for an orphan than to be presumed deceased.”

He spends three weeks with Jacques, reading books at the Montgomery library and picking his brain. Jacques gives him information sparingly, and sometimes lies. Often lies, Quigley thinks, thought mostly he doesn’t so much give Quigley the wrong information so much as pretends not to know certain information. 

“Why are you here?” Quigley demands. He wants his brother. 

“I am looking for some other orphans,”  Jacques says, and Quigley thinks he is telling the truth. “It’s been a terrible week for orphans.”

Quigley’s new commonplace book fills with information about VFD, secret phrases and codes. He learns how to use Verse Fluctuation Declaration and how to respond to someone who did not know it is a sad occasion. 

Jacques leaves a few times, but always comes back for Quigley, until he leaves and fails to return. With his book, half full, he thinks:  _ I did not realize this was such a sad occasion.  _ There is no one to respond to him. 

There is a pair of shoes in the bedroom he now knows belonged, only briefly, to a boy near his own age called Klause. Quigley does hope one day he will cross paths with the boy and get a chance to say thank you, or apologize, for taking the things he left behind. 

There is no one safer, Quigley reminds himself, than a boy presumed dead. 


	2. Chapter 2

Quigley Quagmire does not want to be safe — he wants his brother back. His sister, too — it isn’t that she’s an afterthought. He misses them both, but it’s a different kind of missing, the kind that comes with twelve years of sharing a bedroom and a sense of humor and sometimes a backpack. 

He is jealous of them for the sheer luck of not being the two thirds of them stuck on the same side — and sick at himself for feeling something so petty — in cycles. 

But Jacques Snicket isn’t wrong. He conducts research unfettered. It feels so utterly strange to learn about his parents, who were apparently members of a secret organization and who aren’t there to explain themselves. 

Jacques has the same tattoo his parents do. Or, they did. They’d always explained it away, airily, that they’d been young and in love. “We still are,” his father would say, catching his mother by the hand and waist and giving her a twirl. He hummed,  _ Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.  _ Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. 

Quigley hated everything he was learning from Jacques, because he referred to the Quagmire parents as G and Z and said a lot about his parents as young adults that was incongruous with what he knew about them. “By incongruous,” Quigley said, “I mean to say that what I know about my parents are like the edge pieces of a puzzle, and what you’re telling me about them doesn’t seem to fit.” 

“I know what incongruous means,” Jacques said, indulgent. And then he looked at Quigley for a while. “I should introduce you to K. She’s got to be better at this than I am. I’ve never had an apprentice before.” 

“I’m not your apprentice, sir,” Quigley said. 

“Right,” Jacques said, sounding like he meant to say the opposite. “Sorry. There tends to be only the one role for an orphan with the Volunteer Fire Department.”

“You seem to know a lot of orphans,” Quigley said, which had been bothering him since Jacques had told him about the Baudelaires. 

“Well, when one fights fires, one meets a lot of them.” 

And all of the orphans seemed to be very rich, which had also bothered Quigley, but he was getting used to the gnawing hunger for answers that did not come from Jacques. He said things in halves, giving Quigley the impression that what he got from him was truth, but only a small slice of it. 

He was right, though. Kit Snicket had read lots of Lewis Carroll, which Quigley knew did not make her a good person, but his father always said that being well-read bred empathy, because if you spend so much time imagining others, you cannot possibly go back to a life of imagining that you are the only person that matters. Also, she reminded him of his own sister, with her asymmetrical haircut and notebook full of fragmented poetry. 

Kit took him to the library of congress, which Quigley knew contained the largest collection of maps in the world, and she noted how quiet it was to one of the attendants. 

“Oh,” the attendant said. He was wearing thick glasses, and squinting behind them, “I did not realize this was such a sad occasion.”

Kit took his hand and they both followed the attendant, who led them to a room that was dark and cramped. “The volunteers have disused tunnels all across the city,” she said. When Jacques mentioned VFD by a part of their name, he tended to call them firefighters. Kit almost always called them that, instead. It was strange to look at her and realize that she was Jacques’ twin. He wanted his own siblings back. He would do almost anything for it, and yet, here he was. 

“Did the VFD create the one under my house?” 

“Yes,” she said, finding the enormous book she was looking for a setting it spine down, letting the atlas fall where it wanted. The book split itself and she only squinted at the page for a moment before moving a few sheets to the left. “I need to see where the Baudelaire’s home would have led.”

“Why did my parent’s house lead to that — to where Jacques found me, the reptile house?”

Kit Snicket chewed on the edge of her fingernail, studying the map. Quigley followed her gaze. “Because M and your parents were very good friends. If things had been different, you probably would have all three gone to live with him. Perhaps the six of you, counting the Baudelaires. It might have been quite the comedy of errors.”

Quigley allowed himself to think about it. He had learned a little, but not much about the Baudelaires, but knowing that he and Klaus Baudelaire were of an age (and inseam) was enough to preanufacture a fantasy kinship with the other boy. He was lonely after months without his siblings or parents, and though he had never met Montgomery, the Snicket’s spoke highly of him, and Quigley allowed himself a moment to picture a household, evenly populated by by Quagmires and Baudelaires and ruled over by a benign authority figure who was none of their parents. 

When Quigley met Violet and Klaus, he was pleased to see he had imagined some of it well — in another life, they would have gotten along, he was sure of it. Kit had told him that VFD was full of orphans who thought of each other like siblings, because so many of them lost parents and half-raised each other.

Looking at Violet made him imagine something else entirely. Even wind-chapped and chattering, Quigley wanted to kiss her. He had left the Snickets months before, following the irrepressible pull of the rumor of a file about a possible surviving parent. 

Jacques had told him he was not to go, because since the schism — an event both Snicket’s referenced with some regularity, but never elaborated on — it had been a tactic of the fire starting side to flush orphans out of hiding with versions of the same rumor. The Snickets themselves, Kit explained, had been subject to the same, with only their youngest brother clinging to hope. 

L, Quigley learned, was much like the schism. Always present in the Snicket’s conversation but never in clear focus. Quigley didn’t know what had happened to him, but since Kit and Jacques sent him back and forth to stay with both of them alternately, with no trips to see their younger brother in between, Quigley began to assume that some terrible fate had befallen him. 

When the Stricken Stream melts suddenly, and Quigley is separated from the Baudelaires, Quigley is briefly certain that he is going to die. He is almost thirteen and he thinks,  _ well, that was interesting  _ in summary of his entire life, which is so terrible bleak that later, gasping and pressing his hands to his scalp in an attempt to squeegee some of the excess water out of his hair, he vows never to tell Duncan or Isadora. 

Quigley is certain that he will never be warm again, but it is not true. Kit Snicket, had sent a man with a large, prominent eyebrow ridge and a larger and more prominent snowmobile to pick him up. He suspects that she sent him because the man says the same thing to Quigley that someone had said to Kit in the library of congress: “The world is quiet here,” and Quigley had repeated what Kit had said back and the man had invited him to take a seat on the back of the machine.

When she says, “I think it’s time to get you back with your siblings,” Quigley can feel his fingertips again for the first time in what feels like days.

It takes a long time, and there is much that goes wrong in between. Quigley feels like he only exists in time skips, untethered from his body, focused only on getting back to his brother and his sister, so he can remember his parents in the presence of people who remember the Quagmire parents the way he does, and not as through a dark and cracked glass, as the Snickets seemed to. 

When Duncan, Isadora, and their new friend Hector finally interpret his smoke signals (he’s been sending four or eight a day for three weeks) and land long enough for him to climb over the threshold of the lofted mobile home, Quigley crashes into Isadora so hard he is sure he will bruise her, and then Duncan, with whom he has definitely shared a womb and possibly a placenta and who he has missed insanely and painfully for months. 

“You’re taller than me now,” Duncan complained, but he was laughing, and also crying hysterically. Isadora had one hand pressed to her own face and the other caught tightly in his shirt. The man with them tried to say something pleasant and mundane and probably completely intolerable like  _ hello I am Hector, nice to meet you,  _ but Quigley could not possibly split his attention from his siblings. 

Isadora’s temple was starting to bruise where Quigley had knocked into the side of her face. His own face probably matched. Quigley was stupidly glad for the radiating soreness from his own head. It had been caused by a  _ collision  _ with his  _ sister.  _ Nothing could have ever felt so sweet. 

When, less than twenty four hours since his reunion with the other two remaining Quagmires (and yes, he realizes now how strange it is that neither of his parents had parents of their own, because he feels like everyone he’s met for months has been an orphan and he’s a child but he’s not a stupid one) eagles attack, the color bleeds from Duncan as if he’d been pressure-washed. 

“What are we going to do?” Isadora asked Hector, who seemed to hesitate. Quigley, who was given a tour just a few hours ago, when he finally felt ready to let himself detach for a few minutes from his siblings, looks at the chest against the wall. His time with the Snickets has given him good instincts for weapons storage. 

“What’s in there?” Quigley demanded. 

“Nothing for children!” Hector snapped. 

“Are you going to use them?” The mobile home gave a rickety lurch, not like a balloon had been popped, but like it had been jostled, for sure. 

“They’re endangered,” Hector said. “They’re volunteers.” 

“Right now,” Quigley said, between his clenched teeth, “they’ve  _ volunteered  _ to knock us out of the sky and  _ into the ocean. _ ” 

Duncan stood behind Quigley, close enough that Quigley felt supported by him, but also close enough that Quigley could feel the fine tremors of his body. The owls were scaring him, or perhaps Quigley was. He was sorry about it, but mostly he was furious. With his parents, with the fire starting volunteers, with Hector for being useless and at himself for being only twelve. What use was there in having to rely on people like Hector? 

Here is something else that Quigley thought about, all at once: He loved his parents. His parents were kind and well read and moneyed and they had always taught him to be gracious and say  _ thank you  _ even when you didn’t really want what someone had given you. And then, in the same breath, he thought of the way the Snickets talked about them, respectfully but dubious. His mother had calloused hands when she pushed him into the space under the trap door, under the house, and he had survived while she hadn’t. There was a terrible sort of broken logic in that, that neither of his parents had survived a fire when they should have been better at getting out of them (although, come to think of it, had he heard  _ any  _ stories of anyone in VFD actually fighting fires?) and all three of their useless gazelle children had made it out alive. He thought of being hungry, and cold, and of Duncan and Isadora and Violet and Sunny and Klaus and what he might do  if he could keep them safe. 

His mind returned to his parents, who might have done terrible things, but who had managed to keep them safe, for a while, and in the end when it mattered. Who he loved boundlessly regardless. 

“Move,” he demanded, but then quickly amended. “Please give me the …. whatever you have.”

Hector shouldn’t have listened to him. Quigley was a child. He was also, however, furious and terrified and newly in possession of his two siblings who had had each other while he’d only had the outlines of the place in his life where they were not. He must have looked half-crazed. And perhaps another thing: surely Hector did not want to die. 

Hector stood aside. 

Quigley had never fired a harpoon, but there had been a spear gun, once, in a snow cave when the snow scouts were trying to catch a fish, which seemed to have a similar mechanism. How different could it be?

And then Quigley Quagmire did a terrible thing, and then another terrible thing, and then another, until it was safe for Quigley to sit down and bury his face in his knees and cry like he hadn't since that three hour walk underneath the city he was raised in, the tunnel that led from his parents house to the Montgomery mansion where he might have lived with the Baudelaires in another life, or, in a preferable one: that he might have never known about. 

But he lived in this one, Quigley Quagmire, who was now a boy who killed endangered birds and had so far, survived. Duncan held a hand, and Isadora swept the hair and tears from his face, blew across his hot eyes and the bridge of his nose like his mother had and never would again. It was an unbearable agony, and he was grateful for it. 


End file.
